In 2006, the Black Eyed Peas were visiting an impoverished neighbourhood in Soweto, South Africa, when the band became surrounded by kids. Lifting the arm of a fourteen-year-old boy, Will told the excitable ensemble, ‘He is fourteen. When I was fourteen, I started a group that became the Black Eyed Peas. I, too, came from a poor background. But I have made it – and so can you!’
His positive energy and powers of inspiration have been noted, lauded and enjoyed by many. Will believes he inherited them from the person who inspires him more than anyone: his mother, Debra. ‘She’s supermom and also my best friend,’ he told the Sun. ‘I love her. You should see the text messages she sends me.’ One such message read, ‘No matter how successful you are, we are still struggling,’ Will described messages such as that from his mother as ‘like an ego smack – great reminders of where you are from and where you are in the world. Mom made me think anything was possible.’ The struggle that his mother alludes to is real, and Will’s positivity cannot conceal the challenges he has been through from the start of his life.
People often ask him which nationality he is. His answer is very simple: ‘I’m an American.’ For him, the commonplace description ‘African American’ is not an option. ‘When you ask the black guy in Brazil what nationality he is, he doesn’t say, “African Brazilian”,’ reasoned Will in O magazine. ‘He says, “Brazilian”. Someone doesn’t say, “I’m African English”. They’re English.’ Will knows his ancestors came from Africa but he does not know from which part of the continent they hail, so he prefers to consider himself simply American, ‘the way jazz and blues are American music. The way peach cobbler is an American dessert.’ His choices of imagery reflect a kooky dimension to his love of America – and indeed to much of his life. Will is not acting when he comes across this way: he is an authentic eccentric.
He was born on 15 March 1975, and that year, the world he was born into was twisting to a soundtrack dominated by Bruce Springstreen’s ‘Born in the USA’, Jaws, The Godfather Part II and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest were the big movies of the year, and Muhammad Ali was in his ascendancy in the boxing ring. It was also a significant year in terms of American foreign policy: the Vietnam War came to an end and the US pulled out of Cambodia. President Gerald Ford was in the White House.
His date of birth makes Will a Pisces. He is a keen believer in many spiritual and esoteric trends, and astrology is one of them. As he knows, among the many positive traits associated with Pisceans are adaptability, devotion and imagination. Whether or not one shares his belief in astrology, it is clear that Will has displayed each of these characteristics. Compassion is another virtue with which Pisceans are linked. As we shall see, Will has also shown plenty of that. Less positive characteristics Pisceans are said to portray include over-sensitiveness, indecision and laziness. But even Will’s fiercest critics would struggle to build a case that the restless, workaholic Will is in any way lazy, even emotionally. Indeed, his sensitive nature is clear, and is perhaps the price that he pays for such a creative and imaginative mind.
He was born and raised in east Los Angeles, in a district called Boyle Heights. The impoverished, rough neighbourhood in which he grew up created hardships for Will, but it would also provide rich inspiration for his future creative work in the Black Eyed Peas and beyond. For instance, the fact his was the only black family in the area continues to resonate with Will to this day. How could that band ever have convincingly rocked the ‘misfit’ image, had its pivotal member not grown up as an outsider himself?
The project he lived in was called Estrada Court. Will, who has never met his father, was raised by his mother, Debra, in a large family. Debra has four biological children and ultimately adopted another four kids. ‘I have two brothers and a sister, and Mom adopted two other girls when they were infants; then she just recently adopted two other boys, who are six and seven,’ he told the Guardian. Will’s father, a maintenance worker called William Sr, had left the family between Will’s conception and birth. Before Will himself could escape the Estrada Court Housing Project physically, he did his best to do so emotionally. We all love to dream as children. Will still does: ‘You get to mould your reality. If I didn’t mould my reality then I’d still be in the ghetto where people like me are supposed to stay. You have to dream your way out of the nightmare.’
He had plenty to escape from: not just the material poverty but also the emotional issues that arise in single-parent households. Reports have found that children in single-parent families are five times more likely to develop emotional problems than those living with both parents. They are also three times as likely to become aggressive or badly behaved. Will’s essentially good behaviour as a child is therefore all the more to be admired.
Also present in the family house were other members of the clan, as Elizabeth Gutierrez, a childhood friend of Will, explained to the Mirror. Pointing at the house the family lived in, she said: ‘Will lived there with his grandmother Sarah, mother, Debra, his two uncles, an aunt and some siblings. They were the only black family here – everyone else is Mexican. They didn’t have much money, no one around here does. But they were really nice.’ Indeed, for Will, his strong, and ‘really nice’ family helped keep him happy despite their humble surroundings. The love simply transcended any tests that were thrown at them. ‘For me, with my mum and my family and my upbringing … it was heaven,’ he told the Guardian. ‘It was wonderful, because of my family.’ Also weighing-in to his upbringing were four uncles: ‘my Uncle Donnie, my Uncle Rendal Fay, my Uncle Lynn, my Uncle Roger. Those are my mother’s brothers. Not the Smothers Brothers.’
We all fantasize both about magical futures and also parallel presents. For Will, the need to imagine other worlds was especially keen, as his reality was tough and stark. In some interviews, he has been far less romantic about his childhood than he was in the chat with the Guardian mentioned above. It was a rough neighbourhood: ‘There were a lot of gangs. A lot of my friends are dead, were in prison, on drugs or were selling drugs.’
To this day, Will feels relief that he did not meet such a fate himself. How he did so is little mystery to him, as he simply followed one of the two respectable paths he felt were open to him. ‘You either joined the gang or you did arts or sports,’ he continued. ‘My attire got me through, though. The louder you dressed, it became obvious that you were not in a gang.’ As we shall see, the legacy of this ‘hard-knock’ childhood showed up in other ways when he began to make his fortune later in life. It would make it hard for him to understand the intricacies of his finances. ‘When you are from the ghetto there is no financial literacy,’ he said.
Nowadays, Will spends a lot of his time in England, where he found a parallel neighbourhood that reminded him of Boyle Heights. Surprisingly, this was not in an inner-city region of London, Manchester or another metropolis. Instead, he found England’s equivalent of Boyle Heights in Somerset of all places. Will ran through the area during his mile with the Olympic torch in 2012. ‘There’s one area, it’s like a village of houses and it looked like the neighbourhood I came from in Boyle Heights, where the neighbours looked after the neighbours, and it looked like a real community and that reminded me of the community I come from,’ he said afterwards, to the amusement of some in both Britain and America. Despite the picture of neighbourly co-operation Will paints, the harsher realities of his life remained hard to ignore.
At the same time as he was enduring those realities, his future Black Eyed Peas bandmates were also experiencing hardships of their own. Indeed, the childhoods of the band would shape the bond they would later form. Will’s bandmate, Taboo, for instance, has estimated that ‘sixty per cent’ of the ‘hood’ in which he grew up were gangsters. He recalls going to sleep to a soundtrack of violent ‘bedlam’ in the parking lot, and has also written of the ever-present smell of cannabis that he describes as ‘this scent of childhood’. As Will had done, Taboo watched his mother work ‘her ass off’ to provide for the family. Will is in no sense angry or bitter as a result of the challenges of his childhood. ‘I’m pretty blessed to be able to share all those experiences, from living around Mexicans to going to church with all black people,’ Will told the Phoenix New Times. ‘I don’t look at it as, “Wow, I’m the only one – fuck you.” I look at it as, “Wow, I’m blessed to be able to relate”.’ The reader who appreciates such examples of people turning a challenge or setback into a positive will find much to enjoy in the pages and chapters ahead.
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The first school Will attended was an hour’s bus ride away from the family home. It was called Paul Revere Junior School, named after the famous American patriot, and it provided the building blocks for the education of a future American star. He enjoyed reading, particularly the series produced by one of children’s fiction’s most enduring authors. ‘I liked Dr Seuss,’ he told The New York Times. Even as young as nine years of age, Will was not only falling in love with music, nor was he only dreaming of a future career in the music industry – he was actively working towards making that goal come true. In fact, as far as Will was concerned, it was not a dream or a goal, but an inevitability. He was going to succeed. To that end, he experimented in his room, recording himself singing and rapping over backing tracks. As well as honing his vocal skills, he was also trying to learn how music production worked.
One track he ‘produced’ as a kid was of him rapping over the Bob Dylan track ‘Forever Young’. (Later in life he would follow the same path for a Pepsi promotion.) He also practised dance moves, honing the various skills he knew he would need to succeed. So it was early in life, then, that Will’s hyperactivity surfaced. Indeed, he was diagnosed – formally or informally, we do not know which – with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). ‘Yeah, when I was a kid, they said I had ADD, or whatever,’ he told the Radio Times. ‘They said I was hyper. ADHD? AHHD? Whatever. That’s cool. Actually, I’ve made it work for the best for me. And my mom encouraged me in everything I did.’
Indeed she did. At the age of ten, Will got to see a new kind of life after being given a significant opportunity when his mother sent him to school in a wealthy neighbourhood near Pacific Palisades. The Magnet Program, designed to offer specialized educational opportunities to children from any part of society, regardless of family income or background, helped ease his passage to a better school in a better area.
In Los Angeles there’s a saying: If you’re famous you live in the Hollywood Hills, if you’re rich you live in Beverly Hills, and if you’re lucky you live in Pacific Palisades. Will must have felt lucky indeed as he arrived in this area each morning: the contrast between it and Boyle Heights is striking. Despite the accuracy of the saying about the district, the reality is slightly more complicated. Famous and rich people do live in Pacific Palisades, but they are often down-to-earth celebrities, those who do not buy into the game of hiding behind literal, metaphorical and brickwork sunglasses. This is a district in which accomplished people live a normal, albeit comfortable, existence. Famous names who have lived there include Ben Affleck, Larry David, Jamie Lee Curtis, Ray Liotta, Ozzy Osbourne and Steven Spielberg. This opened Will’s eyes to the possibilities that fame and fortune can bring. Summing up the difference between where he lived and where he studied, Will told an audience of British students that the gap was: ‘Culture-wise and distance … like sending a kid from London to France for school.’
The sense of opportunity and its rich reward is strong in the neighbourhood, which is little short of heavenly in some parts. It is difficult not to be inspired and enlivened. It was, therefore, a significant moment when his mother decided to send Will there. ‘She wanted me to be challenged,’ he explained. One of the challenges was raised by the demographics of his school. He went from being the only black boy in a predominantly Latino neighbourhood to being the only black boy in a predominantly white school.
The establishment he attended was called the Palisades Charter High School. For him, the basic truth about this area was the most pertinent: ‘it isn’t a ghetto’. It would turn out to be a fateful moment in his life story. However, more immediately these were long days for Will. He would be waiting for the school bus just after 6 a.m. each day, which meant he sometimes missed breakfast. ‘And when you’re on food stamps and lunch tickets, missing breakfast is not good for a kid,’ he told the Financial Times. He was a member of the school choir and an enthusiastic participator in other extra-curricular activities, so Will rarely returned home until 8 p.m. Looking back on the opportunity, Will is not one to complain. Without the Magnet Program, he said, he ‘would never have seen what the world was like … I would be stuck thinking the world was the five miles of my surrounding area.’
Comparing the wealthy neighbourhood he travelled to for his schooling, and the ghetto district in which he grew up, Will sensed that in the latter area, the encouragement to disaster was almost inevitable. ‘There’s a family of influences that dictate behaviour,’ he told the Financial Times. ‘In the ghetto, there’s a liquor store, a cheque-cashing place and a motel. What that tells you psychologically is: get a cheque, cash it. Take a couple of steps. Buy some liquor and get drunk, go home and get kicked out of your house. And here’s a place to sleep along the way.’ In contrast, he said, in richer areas the set-up encourages more positive behaviour. He was learning plenty at school, yet Will’s education was also self-administered – merely by keeping his eyes open and his wits about him at all times.
Former classmates of Will remember him as a charismatic and charming boy. Yvette Bucio told the Mirror: ‘I used to ride the bus with Will or “Willy” as we called him. He was exactly the same then as he is now – stylish, attractive and charming. He used to get along with everybody whether they were white, black, Mexican or whatever. After he left, he wrote next to my picture in the yearbook that he had a crush on me. I was really flattered. But then I found out he did the same to all the girls.’ It seems he was quite the amiable politician even back then. Quite the singer, too: Angelica Pereyra, another former classmate of Will’s, recalled how he began freestyle rapping contests in the playground. The boy who would later appear as a judge on a talent contest was a skilled organizer. ‘He was great and everyone used to gather round him and start cheering and shouting,’ said Pereyra. ‘The teachers would always run over because they thought a fight was going on.’ Instead, what they were witnessing were the first live performances from a boy who would later sell out the world’s biggest stadiums and arenas.
Meanwhile, as his adolescence continued, Will’s sexual awakening was beginning. Given the element of mystery that has long surrounded his romantic life, the origins of it are fascinating. Naturally, those origins are less than straightforward, too. As a teenager he fantasized about Charo, the flamboyant and vivacious Latina television personality. She had already been famous for the best part of a decade when she first came to young Will’s attention in the early 1980s. With her trademark saying ‘cuchi-cuchi’ – often accompanied by a sassy wiggle of her hips – Charo caught the attention of many males. ‘I loved me some Charo,’ Will told Elle magazine. ‘Back in the 80s, she was everywhere – The Love Boat, Fantasy Island.’ He says he enjoyed watching her wherever she appeared.
Will’s sexuality is the subject of mystery and conjecture. By his own admission, his introduction to sex was unconventional. When the subject of masturbation was alluded to by one interviewer, Will offered the information that: ‘I didn’t do that until I was nineteen.’ So, while his male school friends will undoubtedly have been exploring themselves enthusiastically, Will refrained from doing so until he was comfortably into manhood. Asked why, he replied: ‘I think my mom had a big role in it. It was a subject we never talked about growing up.’ Stranger still was that he hinted that he had lost his virginity a year before, when he was eighteen. It was a less than romantic experience as he describes it: ‘her mother was in the other room; it was horrible. And then she cheated on me. But I stayed with her, like a bonehead.’
Will’s explanation that his mother’s lack of commentary about sex as she raised him was responsible for his abstinence is intriguing. It is hard to not speculate that there must be more to it, though. Few mothers, after all, would discuss the subject regularly, even at all, with their children. Perhaps he is, cryptically or even subconsciously, referring more to the absence of a father figure. Without an authoritative male voice to discuss the birds and the bees with him, it seems he learned about sex and romance more delicately than he might have. ‘Because I was raised around girls, I think I’ve adopted that perspective on sex,’ he has admitted.
Even back then, Will was living around the rules that his mother constructed for his relationships with girls. ‘She was real strict, but she could be lenient,’ he told the Guardian. ‘I couldn’t bring girls in the house but she let me talk on the phone. And my phone bill was high. I’d been with my first girlfriend, Carmen Perez, for three months before she kissed me. I told my ma, who was like, “I didn’t send you to school to be acting mannish”.’ She had, it seems, somewhat delicate expectations for her son.
Delicate is not, however, a word that can be used to describe all elements of his development. There were some harsh punishments meted out at home. His mother told him: ‘I am your daddy.’ She was as good as her word, inflicting physical punishment when she felt it necessary. For instance, when he was at high school, Will developed a habit of scrawling graffiti. He used to write the word ‘expo’ – an abbreviation of exposure – on walls and other surfaces. The thrill of graffiti has never quite left Will. In later life he would be caught by the police, but back at high school it was his Uncle Fay who busted him. He duly reported Will to his mother, saying: ‘Debra! Willie over there writing on them walls!’ Debra was furious. She called Will into the house and told him: ‘Sit your butt down on the couch!’ Will feared a formidable ticking off – but he received more than that. ‘She started hitting me,’ he told Elle.
The physical punishment certainly had the desired effect. ‘My mom’s discipline worked out perfectly,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t change a thing. And my mom got hit by my grandma, who’s the sweetest person on the freakin’ planet.’ However, while Will is comfortable with the corporal punishment he received, he does not believe it would be as appropriate for today’s children. ‘Cultures change,’ he said, adding that we now live in ‘a different era’.
How influential has the fact Will grew up in a single-parent household been on his life? Later, while in the throes of a less-than-perfect eight-year relationship with a woman, Will saw a counsellor and was encouraged to conclude that the absence of a father in his upbringing had left a specific mark on his mentality. ‘I learned in counselling that me and my ex-girlfriend both have a fear of abandonment from not having a role model in relationships,’ he told the Guardian. ‘My mom’s never been married. I’ve never even seen my mom kiss a dude.’ That said, Will is the first to say that his mother was a pivotal influence in the success he would go on to achieve professionally. She encouraged him to be different, primarily in order to give him the best chance possible to ascend from the tough surroundings in which he’d been raised.
However, her motivation was wider than that. She wanted Will to explore himself and be an individual regardless of the circumstances of his childhood. His was not an upbringing in which unimaginative conformity was automatically valued or rewarded. Nor was undue deference: Debra wanted Will to be a leader rather than a follower. This wish showed itself in a number of ways during his childhood. For instance, rather than encouraging him to join in with the games other kids played, Debra showed him how much more value there was in creating his own games, so other kids would come and join him.
It was during the first half of his teenage years that Will began to experiment with making music. ‘[It was] when I was like thirteen, fifteen,’ he said. ‘At thirteen, I started rhyming. At fifteen, I started making beats.’ Also, at the age of fourteen, he began to learn about how to write his own music. His reasoning was that if you wanted to move to Germany, you would learn German first. Therefore, if you wanted to move into the music industry, you had to learn music.
Which was something he was continuing to do. Before he was will.i.am, Will was Will 1X (sometimes spelled as WilloneX). It is not quite such a catchy moniker, but it represents where he was at this stage in his life. Indeed, according to someone who knew Will at the time, this earlier character was a ‘mini-me’ reflection of the iconic will.i.am celebrity of today.
One of his childhood friends was Stefan Gordy. The son of Motown founder Berry Gordy, Stefan would go on to achieve musical fame himself later in life, as ‘Redfoo’, one of the members of the band LMFAO. Will first noticed him when he realized, with amusement, that Stefan would arrive at school wearing tennis kit.
At this stage, Will was using his younger sister’s talking bear to record some rudimentary raps. ‘I used to record on my little sister’s Teddy Ruxpin tapes to make Teddy Ruxpin rap,’ he told the Huffington Post. ‘So I used to put my little demo inside his belly and press play and he used to kick my lyrics in homeroom show-and-tell.’ To take the recording further, he leveraged his relationship with Stefan. ‘So after homeroom show-and-tell, I gave the tape to Stefan: “Give this to your pops”. And he didn’t give it to his dad, so he gave it to his brother, Kerry, and then Kerry says, “You’re really talented, this is cool.”’ This was enough for Will to impose renewed hustling pressure on Stefan. ‘To make a long story short, in the tenth grade I tell Stefan, “Tell your daddy to get you some music equipment so we can record after school”.’
While studying at a summer school at John Marshall High in Los Feliz, Will first met another boy who would change his life. Allan Pineda Lindo, now better known as apl.de.ap (or simply apl), of The Black Eyed Peas, quickly struck up a rapport with Will. Allan was born in the Philippines to a Filipino mother and black father. His father left home soon after Allan was born, leaving Allan’s mother to raise seven children on her own. Although he was the youngest of the family, Allan quickly grew an old head on his young shoulders. His family was struggling to survive and so even as a child he worked on a local farm to bring some much needed extra funds into the household. His grace was rewarded when a television commercial, made by a charity called the Pearl Buck Foundation, featured his plight on American television. A Californian businessman was so moved by the commercial that he arranged to adopt the fourteen-year-old and bring him to a new, more comfortable, life in Los Angeles. It was that man, Joe Ben Hudgens – a former roommate of one of Will’s uncles – who set in motion the wheels that would bring Lindo to Will’s attention.
So Will began to write songs with apl and they quickly developed an understanding that was so strong that, to outsiders observing their creative interactions, it appeared almost telepathic. This synergy would make them very rich in the years ahead. For the time being, it provided them with something valuable in a different way: a sense of exciting hope. Will was learning quickly the methodology behind a good song and he soon realized that writing lyrics from personal experience was the best route to a powerful song. He also tended to eschew the use of long words, feeling that simplicity was key to the creation of a catchy message. However, the lyrics were not the part of the composition he generally started with, because he also lived by the rule: rhythm comes first, words later. Indeed, his style of songwriting quickly developed a regular sequence, which lasted into the formation of the Black Eyed Peas. Taboo, who would also be a member of that band, described it as: ‘rhythm-became-mumbles-became-words-became-lyrics-became song’.
As well as hanging out at club nights such as Club What?, Will began to attend raves in Los Angeles. Alongside a childhood friend called Pasquale (Pasquale Rotella, now the boss of Insomniac Events and architect of the annual electronic dance music festival Electric Daisy Carnival), he partied the nights away at some huge and thrilling events.
Will, quite the technology buff nowadays as we shall see, has looked back fondly on the movement around these parties. At the time they seemed to be cutting edge but now elements of their organization seem quaint. ‘In LA in the early, early 1990s, there were raves that were like secret clubs, and thousands of people would go, and the way you found out about it was you went to a map point and the map point gave you another map point and that map point gave you directions,’ he said, during a conversation with the LA Times. ‘Way before pagers, way before cell phones and the Internet. You physically had to go to two locations to get the address. Tens of thousands of people would show up in the desert or in the warehouses or these secret locations where the raves would be.’
These were exciting events with thronging attendances. ‘There would be, you know, between 10,000 and 50,000 people,’ he told the Guardian. ‘People would express themselves with loud colours, DJs would play crazy beats,’ he added. Asked whether these gatherings were legal or not, he admitted they were not. ‘[They were] illegal, yes, all right, OK, you got me there,’ he said. ‘We were kids!’
It is worth restating that Will was still a schoolboy as he and Pasquale partied the night away at these raves. He was, in fact, a tenth-grade pupil. The morning after one of these raves, he and his classmates would be discussing their night out as they sat down in the classroom. He remembers whispering with classmates about how ‘crazy’ a night out had been, and a classmate turning round to tell him: ‘Dude, I’m still rolling.’
Will admits that other kids at his school took drugs at these raves, though he denies he did. ‘I’m talking about eleventh-graders, fifteen-year-olds in high school,’ he said. ‘Where I was going to high school people were rolling, and coming down from the drug. I didn’t do that stuff, and Pasquale didn’t do that stuff. But we went, and we liked the vibe and the scene.’
That vibe and scene captured Will’s imagination in such a way that it has, at the time of writing at least, yet to release its grip. The rave scene quickly peaked and, in its most exciting and authentic form, disappeared. However, some acts have kept the flame alive by incorporating its light into their own material. The Black Eyed Peas are one of those bands. More immediately, back then, these nights out were great ways for Will to release any tension inside him. His teenage troubles seemed to melt away as he danced.
He was also paying close attention to the music coming out of his radio at the time. He noted the way that hip-hop was up-tempo in this era, and the influence that this had on rave culture. Songs such as ‘It Takes Two’, which he clocked in at 127 beats per minute, and Jungle Brothers, Technotronic and Queen Latifah tracks that added a ‘poppier’ sound to the mix, all fed into the prevailing atmosphere. ‘And we liked that because that’s what we danced to,’ he told the LA Times, describing him and his friends at the time as ‘what you called “house dancers” – we used to dance house’.
The next phase was when Will and his fellow house dancers – we are here effectively describing the Black Eyed Peas and their entourage before the band was officially formed – moved a step further. This started when Will and Allan Lindo began to perform together around Los Angeles. A fellow student named Dante Santiago sometimes joined them for these performances. They called themselves Atban Klann, and during one of their performances, they were to be noticed by a highly revered figure on the rap scene.
Born with the less-than-gangster name of Eric Lynn Wright, Eazy-E would grow-up to be so influential he would be declared the ‘the Godfather of Gangsta Rap’. He formed a label, Ruthless Records, and then a band – N.W.A. (Niggaz With Attitude). His band would prove to be a huge hit, practically defining the gangsta rap movement in the eyes of millions around the world in the late 1980s and early 1990s. While the band remained a controversial one due to their name and many of their lyrics, songs such as ‘Express Yourself’ made for a more mainstream and positive dimension to their act. Meanwhile, Eazy-E scouted for new acts to sign to Ruthless Records. One of them would be Will. ‘I was free-styling at a club event that David Faustino from Married With Children was hosting, and there were some Ruthless Records representatives there,’ Will explained later in an interview with the AV Club website. It was an arrangement entirely free of red tape, which suited him at first. ‘They signed me just off my free-styling. Once again, there were no contracts, no demo, no lawyers, or any of that dumb shit. I got fucked in the long run, but it started out well.’
He received $10,000 for his agreement on the deal, but the prestige and boost it gave him were immeasurable. He even began ghostwriting lyrics for Eazy-E. ‘I knew how to write those kind of rhymes, I just didn’t want to rap,’ he said. ‘Eazy-E was one of those cats that wanted to have dope MCs around him to write his shit, or to just be there. He just wanted to be surrounded by dope shit. Now, I’m not saying that I was one of his dope-shit selections, but he wasn’t closed-minded, that guy.’
The credibility that this deal lent Will can’t be overestimated. As a schoolboy he had been noted by one of the leading rap artists of the moment. ‘I was in high school, so it was a dream come true,’ he said in an interview with Hip-Hop DX. ‘To be in the eleventh grade, twelfth grade, and you’re running with Eazy. N.W.A. was, still … think about what they were in ’92, ’93. That was unbelievable. That’s like being in high school right now, and you’re working with … you can’t compare it. You can’t compare it to 50 Cent or Jay-Z, because Eazy-E was the first nigga.’
He later recalled how he showed off about his success. ‘I come to school with a record deal, like, “Yo, I got a record deal, ten G’s”,’ he added. ‘To a seventeen-year-old, ten thousand dollars – granted, it was, like, for life, Eazy-E had me signed like for ever.’
Will wanted to confirm the faith that was increasingly being placed in him and so he began to take part in ‘rapping battles’ at a nightclub called Ballistyx. It was there that he and apl first met their future bandmate, Taboo, putting the seal on the initial line-up of what would become the Black Eyed Peas.
It was a friend of Will’s, known as Mooky, who suggested that he meet up with Taboo. Will remembered seeing Taboo – whose real name is Jaime Luis Gómez – as he was dancing or, in their words, ‘doing something special’. Wearing ‘thrift’ clothes, complete with a beret, Taboo made for quite a sight. ‘He’s kind of scary looking, but his dancing is dope,’ apl told Will. Soon, both men began to wonder: ‘Who’s the dancer?’
As for Taboo, he remembered seeing a sixteen-year-old ‘eccentric-looking black dude’, who was ‘rapping like a madman’. As Will rapped he played with his dreadlocks. His ‘wide-eyed intensity’ made Taboo wonder if this eccentric was ‘in some kind of trance’. Will was rapping faster than Taboo had ever heard anyone rap before. It was a ‘whirlwind’, remembered Will’s future bandmate in his autobiography. Even then, Will’s charisma and stage-presence were powerful. He ‘owned the floor’ and had more energy than the rest of the club combined. ‘He was as colourful as his socks were loud, and as brilliant as anything I’d seen on the street, in videos, or in battles.’
From the moment the three band members first got together as a unit, recalls Taboo, it was clear they shared a ‘unity in spirit, intention and meaning’. He recalls liking Will, who he viewed as ‘a perfectionist, all about the pristine clothes, the focus to be number one, and keen on detail’. However, that perfectionism could flare-up into confrontation with anyone he felt might be poised to upstage him. During an open-mic battle with a twelve-year-old called Little E, Will at first let the youngster have his moment on the stage. Then, Will’s competitive spirit kicked in and he fiercely contested. ‘Will turned it on and smoked him,’ recalled Taboo. Will’s performance made him the clear winner of the battle. Afterwards, the boy’s uncle confronted the triumphant winner, accusing him of ‘disrespecting my little nephew’. Voices were raised and the men began to shove each other. Will’s friend Mooky had to step in to prevent violence breaking out.
Will was proving to be an unstoppable force in these MC battles. As the Hollywood MC champion he managed a winning streak of weekly victories that ran for an astonishing eighteen months. He seemed almost invincible – and certainly felt it at times. He even saw off a highly rated MC from Chicago, called Twista, an artist who had appeared in The Guinness Book of World Records as the fastest rapper in the world. As Taboo put it, ‘hip hop greats were bowing down’ to Will.
There was no doubting the ferocity of Will’s ambitions. Taboo recalls how Will used to talk about his ‘big dream’ and how he was going to make it work. He was a good talker even then: Taboo describes how Will was a natural-born storyteller, who was ‘fast, clever and animated’. Although he could be shy and ‘guarded’ when he first met people as a teenager, Will would soon open up once he knew someone – and as he opened up, he revealed huge reserves of determination, vision and ability. Few who met him left after an encounter with Will unaware that he intended to go places in life and that he had the ability to do so. His energy was such that he did not only impress people with his own ambition: he also recharged their own aspirations and positivity. He quite naturally had the sort of charisma and presence that politicians sometimes spend enormous sums to try to develop.
According to Taboo, Will was also an expert roller of joints. In his book, Taboo remembers Will handing him ‘the most expertly, perfectly rolled joint’ he had ever seen – he described it as such a finely formed cigarette that it was as if Will had ‘micromanaged’ its construction. What also impressed Taboo was that the joint had been rolled so quickly – but then Will has long lived his life as if he is late for an important meeting with lots of other ambitious eccentrics. Not that Will was a pot-smoker himself. According to his bandmate, having had a bad experience with the drug, Will had decided never to try it again – and it seems clear that he has abstained from drug-taking. Perhaps he felt that cannabis, which has a reputation as a drug that saps its users of energy, focus, belief and ambition, was the last thing he needed, as he was positively overflowing with all those virtues. As Taboo said, Will emitted an ‘invincible aura that screamed: “I’m going to be somebody”.’ Even the way Will dressed, Taboo said, absolutely shone with ‘fire and hunger’. Extensive cannabis use would surely dampen that ardour.
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When he was twenty, Will fell in love for the first time. It was an association that developed into an eight-year-long relationship, and not one that was entirely enjoyable. During the relationship, when ‘things got hard’, the couple even went to a relationship counsellor, who encouraged them to do activities together. One of these was to cook food together – ‘that’s why I know how to cook now’, said Will, looking back. ‘It wasn’t abusive, it was just destructive emotionally.’ He has been coy about the identity of the woman, only saying: ‘she still lives in the ghetto we came from, in Compton, LA’, and that: ‘she doesn’t care about entertainment, or fashion, she’s just a real person’.
As a result, the more famous Will became while they were together, the more uninterested she became in the world of celebrity. While Will appreciated her lack of interest in fame, the two were pulling in different directions. Their split was inevitable but, even after it, Will felt that what they had would, in a sense, last for ever. ‘I will always love my ex-girlfriend,’ he later told the Guardian. ‘She’ll get married, but that love we had, regardless of exclusivity, is beyond that. Love lasts for ever.’ He would even go on to offer her a slice of the profits from one of the songs she inspired.
Some of Will’s views on sex and sexuality have been highly controversial. He has, more recently, made some rather prim and prudish statements about it, and it is worth briefly stepping forward in the story to connect them. He was asked what would guarantee to put him off a woman. ‘If she had condoms in her house, that would just fuckin’ throw me off,’ he said. ‘That’s just tacky.’ Some women found this statement highly offensive. At the time, his female interviewer took him up on his outburst, asking him why he was so offended by the thought of a woman taking precautions. ‘I just think, like, if you’re into someone and you guys get to that level, then that’s something you should converse about together and say, “Hey, maybe we should get some”,’ he said.
Outraged women asked who he thought he was to suggest there was something wrong with them having contraceptives. Others felt his views were arcane or misogynistic. However they really seem to hint at the contradictions that make Will such an intriguing character. As far as some of his fans are concerned, his contradictions and complexities survive to this day – they are what make Will such a vulnerable, and therefore attractive, character.
Even before he was famous, Will was building a reputation for himself not only as a promising musician and performer, but also as an attractive character of dazzling influence. Together, these gifts would take him far. It was his mother who continued to influence him as he formed his musical energies into a three-piece unit, into a successful band, then fashioned that into a world-conquering supergroup. ‘My mom keeps me down to earth,’ he said. ‘I’d hate for my mom to see me act like a dick, so I try not to act like a dick.’ Not that he would use such language in front of Debra. As he told The New York Times: ‘When I get around my mom, all my cuss words are deleted from my vocabulary. Automatically, they just leave.’
It was Debra’s example that lit the spark to the forcefield of motivational charisma that has come to serve Will so well. She was the first to lift him from the surroundings he was born into. First, she did so emotionally, by encouraging him to stay positive and not fall into the many traps that surrounded them. Then she did so by arranging for him to be schooled in a better area. Will has honoured her in many ways, not least the fact that rather than writing songs that glorified the squalor and danger that surrounded him, he instead wrote positive songs that encouraged everyone, whatever their background, to believe in themselves, to better themselves and to enjoy the ride. In so doing, he not only honoured Debra, he also put a smile on faces around the world.